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Monday, March 7, 2011

Book Review - Ford the Men & The Machine by Robert Lacey


This book holds a great place for me. This is the first scholarly Ford book I ever read. At the tender age of 8 no less. I got made fun of at school for reading it instead of comic books, but I didn't care, Ford books rule over any other kind of book.

With any book there are negatives & positives. Negatives such as the rather rushed last couple chapters, the rather obvious author's stance on politics & unions- his views show in the writing on chapters dealing with Labor Relations, The Peace Ship, and Presidents Roosevelt & Coolidge.

The positives include presenting new information, an easy to read format suited to the general public and Ford Scholar alike, and a few never before published photographs.

This book was the basis for the bloody awful(at least from a Ford Historian perspective) made for TV movie that starred Cliff Robertson as Henry Ford. We will cover that in the next post.

All in all, this is a good addition to your Ford books shelf if you don't have it already and you can pickup a used hardback copy for under $5.